CHRIS PELICANO: Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Chris Pelicano.
I'm the security engineering manager here at Google.
Very briefly, I will introduce our guest this afternoon.
He's a blogger.
Most of you know him from schneier.com.
He's an author.
Many works including "Liars and Outliers," which he'll be
talking about today.
Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Schneier.
[APPLAUSE]

BRUCE SCHNEIER: If you put that near me, there's feedback
and it's all bad.
Hi, thanks.
I'm actually not going to talk about my book, because I
figure if you want to hear about it, you can read it.
I'd rather talk about stuff that I've been thinking about
since that.
This is very much ideas in progress, which makes it good
for a talk here.
I'm always interested in feedback and comments, and
there will be time for that.
What I want to talk about is security and power because I
think that is a lot of what's interesting right now, and
going on right now.
So basically, technologies are disruptive.
They disrupt society by disrupting power balances.
And you can look at the history of the plow, or the
stirrup, or gun powder, the printing press, telegraph,
radio, airplane, container shipping, disease resistant,
drought resistant wheat and see how those technologies
changed the balance of power.
And there's a lot written about this--
written as history.
Harder is doing this in the present--
which is really what I'm thinking about--
on the internet.
The internet is incredibly disruptive.
We've seen entire industries disappear.
We've seen entire industries created.
We've seen industries upended.
We've seen the computer industry, itself, upended
several times.
Government has changed a lot.
We see governments losing power as citizens organize.
We're seeing political movements become easier.
We're seeing totalitarian states use power.
Really, the Obama campaign was revolutionary in how they used
the internet to organize and engage people.
You could look at how technology has changed the
media, ranging from the 24-hour news cycle, to
bloggers, and citizen journalism, and two-way
communications, and the acute explosion of media sources,
social power-- there's a lot here--
personal publishing, the internet
email, criminal power--
certain crimes becoming easier--
identity theft, which is really impersonation fraud
done to scale, and how the internet has changed things.
And I think about how this affects computer security--
which is basically what I do--
and then, how that affects the rest of the world.
So traditionally, computer security has had the model of
the user takes care of it.
That's been the traditional model.
It's actually a very strange model.
We are selling products that aren't secure, aren't any
good, and expect the user to make them good.
I think of it as an automobile manufacturer, when they sell
you a car, saying, that car doesn't come with breaks.
But brakes are really important, and we think you
should have them.
There's some good aftermarket dealers.
But you should get some break installed pretty quickly,
maybe on the drive home.
It's a much safer car that way.
In a lot of ways, that's what we would do with anti-virus,
with firewalls.
We would sell these products and expect the user to do it
themselves, to have some level of expertise necessary to
secure their environment.
There's a lot of reasons why we did this.
It's the speed of our industry.
It's the youth of our industry.
But it was the norm.
That model is breaking.
That model is less becoming the norm.
It's changing, not because we've realized there are
better ways to do security, but because of how computers
and the net are working today.
There are two trends that, I think, change this model.
The first is cloud computing.
Now on the one hand, cloud computing isn't anything new.
In the '60s, we called it time sharing.
In the '80s, we called it client server.
In the '90s--
I had a company-- we called it managed
security or managed services.
It's, fundamentally, a balance between the cost of
computation and the cost of data transport.
In the '60s, computation's very expensive, so it makes
sense to centralize computers in their own rooms with their
own air conditioning and give people badges.
In the '80s, what becomes expensive is large storage, so
you end up with a client server model.
In the '90s, it's more services.
Right now, the cost of computing is really dropping
towards free.
The cost of transport is dropping towards free.
So what makes sense economically is to put your
computers on the places on the planet where they can be run
the most cheaply, and access them from wherever you are.
That seems to be the endgame.
There's nothing cheaper than free.
The times where you see computation pushed to the
edges are places where you have relatively low
bandwidth--
maybe mobile applications--
or relatively high need for local
computation, like gaming.
But even those are becoming more of a cloud model.
So that's the first trend.
The second trend is locked down endpoints.
And I think this is more of a trend in businesses than in
technology.
But nowadays, the computing platforms we buy, we have much
less control over.
I have an iPhone.
I can't clear my cookies on an iPhone.
I can't get a program that does that.
I can't even get a program that erases files, because I
don't have direct control over the memory map.
So these end user devices, whether they are
tablets, or phones, or Kindles, the user has much
less control over.
On a Kindle, updates are downloaded automatically and I
can't even say yes.
At least, on the iPhone, I can say yes or no.
But I still don't have anywhere near the control I
have on my OSs.
OSs are moving that direction as well.
Both Windows 8 and Mountain Lion are moving to the
direction of these mobile platforms, to give the user
less control.
And I think this is just purely economics.
The companies have realized that the more they can control
the supply chain, the better they'll do.
So whether it's Apple, with their Apple store--
however the system works, you're just better off if you
can control as much of the environment as possible.
So this brings us to a new model of security.
And the model is someone else takes care of it.
The model is it just happens automatically, by magic.
This happens on my Gmail account.
I have no control over Gmail security.
I have to simply trust that Google does it.
I have no control over my pictures on Flickr, or my
Facebook account, any of that stuff.
And I have less and less control over the devices where
I view these things.
So users have to trust vendors to a degree we hadn't, before.
There are a lot of good reasons why we do this.
All the reasons why these models make sense--
convenience, redundancy, automation, the ability to
share things.
And the trust can be surprisingly complete.
We're living in a world where Facebook mediates all of our
friend interactions.
Already, Google knows more about my interests than my
wife does, which is a little bit freaky.
Google knows what kind of porn every American likes, which is
really freaky.
But it's a trade off.
It's a trade off we actually do pretty willingly.
We give up some control in exchange for the environment
that works well for us.
And we trust that the vendors will treat us well, and
protect us from harm.
On the other hand, we're running out of other options.
For most everybody, there aren't any real, viable
alternatives.
I run Eudora, but I'm, increasingly, a freak.
My mother has a way better time on her computer since she
got an Apple and has Apple handling every part of her
computing environment.
She loses a phone, she gets a new one.
It just works great.
And most of us can't do it ourselves.
This is becoming more and more complex.
I can't offer advice to tell people to run
their own mail servers.
That didn't make sense 20 years ago.
It really doesn't make sense now.
And you can't run your own Facebook.
So the model I think of when I think of this type of
computing environment is feudal security--
and that's "feudal" with a "d," and not with a "t." It's
that we, as users, have to pledge our allegiance to some
powerful company who, in turn, promises to protect us.
And I like it as a metaphor both because there's a real,
rich historical metaphor, and because everyone's watching
"Game of Thrones." So you can pull from both sources.
And if you go back to classic, medieval feudalism, it was a
system designed for a dangerous environment where
you needed someone more powerful than
you to protect you.
It was a series of hierarchical relationships.
There were obligations in both directions.
It was actually a pretty complex political system.
And I see more of it permeating the environment
that we work in today.
It has its advantages.
For most people, the cloud providers are better at
security than they are.
Automatic cloud backup is fantastic.
Automatic updates is fantastic.
All these things are good.
So feudal security provides this level of security that
most everybody is below.
So it will raise them up to whatever level the providers
are providing.
For those up here, it lowers them down.
And where you see barriers to people adopting this are
things like the banks, who, naturally, have a higher level
of security, and don't want to go down.
I assume that at some point, we are going to see a business
model of a high security cloud vendor--
whether it's a Dropbox or an email service--
just something for some of these more
high assurance users.
We also have the problem of regulation.
For a lot of companies, they have auditing reporting
requirements.
And if you go to Dropbox and say, we're using you for our
company, we need to audit your system, they will say, go
away, or to Rackspace.
I assume we're going to see some water flow auditing
model, where the Rackspace audit flows down to whatever
service works on top of that, which flows down to whatever
company now uses that service.
Because I think we have to solve the
regulatory barriers, here.
Feudal security has risks.
The vendors are going to act in their self interest.
You hope that their self interest dovetails with your
self interest, but that's not always the case.
It's much less the case when you're not paying for the
service, when, in fact, you are a user, not a customer.
As we see, vendors will make side deals with the
government.
And the legal regime is different.
If the data is in your premises, then
it's in their premises.
Vendors can act arbitrarily.
Vendors can make mistakes.
And vendors have an incentive to keep users tied to
themselves.
You guys are an exception by allowing users to take their
data and leave.
Most companies don't do that.
Because tying the data to the company increases lock in,
increases the value of the company.
So this model is inherently based on trust.
It's inherently based on the companies--
the feudal lords--
convincing the users to trust them with their data, their
photos, their friends-- with everything.
And unfortunately, the business model for a lot of
these companies is basically betraying
that trust for profit.
And that is, depending on which company, more or less
transparent, more or less salient.
A lot of effort does go into hiding that fact, to
pretending it's not true.
And as it turned out, these companies have a side business
betraying the trust to the government, too.
So there is a little bit, or in some cases, a lot, of
deceit that this is all based on.
And I do worry about how long that can sustain.
Some of it, it seems to be able to be sustained
indefinitely.
For others, I'm not so sure.
The feudal model is also inherently based on power.
And that's what I'm thinking is interesting, right now.
And it does dovetail very nicely with the current
alignment of power on the internet--
the rise of the controlled endpoints, and the third party
holding your data--
those two different polls.
So I started the talk by mentioning about the internet
changing power.
And if you look back at history of the internet, a lot
of us thought that it would flow in a certain direction.
The internet was really designed in the way that made
most technical sense.
There wasn't a lot of agenda placed on the net, as it was
first designed.
And if you look back at the literature around that time,
you read about the natural laws of the internet, that the
internet works a certain way because it's like gravity.
It's just the way it has to work.
It's the way that makes sense.
And a lot of us thought this was inevitable, this was the
way the world had to work.
I have two quotes.
One is John Perry Barlow.
In 1996, he's addressing the World Economic Forum.
And he has something called "The Declaration of
Independence of Cyberspace," which is a
great document to read.
And he's telling governments things like, "You have no
moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of
enforcement we have reason to fear." Three years earlier,
John Gilmore writes that, "The internet interprets censorship
as damage, and routes around it."
These are very Utopian quotes, but we all
believed them back then.
We believed that is how the internet works, that the
internet takes the masses, makes them powerful, takes the
governments and makes them powerless.
It turns out, that's just not true.
That's not the way it works.
What the internet does, like many
technologies, is magnify power.
It magnifies power, in general.
And what happened is, when the powerless discovered the
internet, suddenly they had power.
The hackers, the dissidents, the criminals, the
disenfranchised--
as those marginal groups discovered the net, suddenly,
they had power they didn't have before.
And the change was fast, and it was stark.
But when powerful interests realized the potential of the
internet, they had more power to magnify.
They were much slower, but their ability to use the
internet to increase their power is greater.
The unorganized were more nimble and quick, and the
institutions were slower and more effective.
And that's where we are today.
So I look around and I see four classes of
internet tools of power.
And what's interesting about them is they all are tools by
which a totalitarian government can increase their
power, but they all have viable
market reasons for existing.
So censorship is also a content filtering, or data
loss prevention.
Propaganda is marketing.
Surveillance is surveillance.
I guess, personal data collecting.
Surveillance is the business model the internet.
Use control--
in China, programs have to be certified by the government in
order to be used on computers there, which sounds an awful
lot like the Apple store.
I mean we laugh, but this is important.
We're building tools that have very different sorts of uses
depending on who's using them, and why.
And in both the government and the corporate sphere, powerful
interests are gaining power with these tools.
Censorship and surveillance are both on the rise.
The internet censorship project, which tracks
censorship around the world, finds more of it every year.
We see more surveillance by governments every year, even
before the United States stuff that happened two weeks ago.
More personal data is being collected and correlated.
More control over our hardware and software.
Less purchasing, more licensing--
we saw Adobe move to that model.
This is getting harder.
I'm trying to find a taskless productivity tool, and I can't
find a good one that doesn't require me to use the cloud.
And we have corporations--
I think Facebook is one interesting example--
that are actually changing social norms.
They are affecting what people think is normal, is regular,
for a profit motive.
I think propaganda is something we don't talk about
a lot, but it's both in companies and governments.
I mean we might call it viral marketing, and there are some
cute names for it, but basically, it's propaganda.
And we're seeing more and more of it.
And now, we're at the point where power basically controls
everyone's data.
Because in a lot of ways, personal data equals power,
both on the government side and the corporate side.
Even in non-internet businesses, the need to own
the relationship, to know more about the customer, is driving
a lot of data collection, and all that back end correlation.
And I worry a lot about the commingling of corporate and
government interests here.
We live in a world--
I don't have to go through the details-- of ubiquitous
surveillance.
Basically, everything is collected.
Charlie Strauss has written about this as the end of
pre-history, that sometime in our lifetime we're going to
switch from pre-history, where only some things were saved,
to actual history, where everything is saved.
Now, we're in a world where most everything is saved.
And what's happening now-- and I think it's something I'm not
happy about, but try to understand--
is how powerful interests are trying to steer this.
I mentioned Facebook changing social norms.
But we're seeing industries lobbying for laws to make
their business models more profitable.
So that's laws to prevent digital copying, laws to
reduce privacy, laws allowing different businesses to
control bandwidth.
And on the government side, we're seeing international
bodies trying to get rulings to make the internet easier to
surveil, and to sensor.
I've heard this called "cyber nationalism." And last
November in Dubai, there was a meeting of the ITU-- that's
the International Telecommunications Union.
Those are the guys that run the phone system.
They're not really very tech savvy, but they are very
international.
They are very non-US centric.
And they want to wrest control of the internet from the US.
For a lot of reasons, I think this would be a disaster.
But there's a strong push.
And unfortunately--
I wrote this in my blog, today--
I think all the Snowden documents make their case a
lot easier.
Because now, when they say, well you can't trust the
Americans, everyone will say, oh yeah, you're right.
You can't trust the Americans.
So these things are happening now.
We're seeing a large rise in the increase of militarization
of cyberspace, which will push more of the internet under
government control.
I very much believe we are in the middle of a
cyber war arms race.
And it's heated up a little bit in the
past couple of weeks.
Because we've been complaining about China for
the past few years.
I've always assumed we've been giving as
good as we're getting.
And now, we're getting data that we are giving as good as
we're getting, which is just going to make things worse.
We're pretty sure that the cyber attack against the Saudi
oil company Aramco was launched by Iran in
retaliation for Stuxnet, which sounds complicated.
But I don't know geopolitics.
Maybe that makes sense.
And we're seeing a lot of alignment of corporate and
government power.
I'm pretty sure I'm quoted in "The New York Times," today,
as calling Facebook "the NSA's wet dream." I'm surprised I
used those words.
It was probably a long interview.
So here's a way to think of it.
In our country, we have two different types of law.
There's constitutional law, that regulates what
governments do, and there's regulatory law, that
constrains what corporations so.
And they're kind of separate.
We're now living in a world where each group has learned
to use the other's law to get around its own restrictions.
If the government said, you all have to carry tracking
devices 24/7, that would be unconstitutional.
They could never get away with it.
Yet, we all carry cell phones.
If they all said, you must register whenever you meet a
new friend, we'd never allow it.
Yet, we all go on Facebook.
And actually, I played this earlier.
Two years ago, "The Onion" did a video.
Just go to YouTube and type "the onion facebook cia." It's
a short news video about Facebook
being the new CIA program.
It's hysterical.
And is two years old, which makes it kind of sad.
On the other hand, we're seeing corporations use the
governments to enforce their business models.
If, I don't know, the movie industry said that we're going
to go into people's computers that trash them if we think
they're copying files, that would be wrong.
But they're going to try to get a law
to do the same thing.
Copyright--
a lot of examples where industries are bypassing their
own problems by going through government.
And I think this only gets exacerbated as there's more
technology.
Feudal lords get more powerful.
And some of that is just the natural order of bigness in
our society right now.
The way technology is right now, it favors the big.
It doesn't favor many small.
It favors two or three on top and nobody else.
And it's true in geopolitics, too.
Think about it.
In any climate change negotiation on the planet, who
do you think has more power--
Exxon or Bolivia?
It's not even close.
Who has more power--
Exxon or the United States?
That's actually a discussion.
This is weird.
So that's one trajectory.
There's another trajectory.
There's a counterbalancing one, based on different
natural laws of technology.
So in the book I'm not talking about, "Liars and Outliers," I
discuss something called a security gap.
And in that book, I'm talking about, effectively, the arms
race between attackers and defenders, and that technology
causes disruptions in that arms race, and then, there's a
rebalancing.
So firearms are invented, fingerprint
technologies are invented.
All those things upset the balance between
attackers and defenders.
And one of things I point out is that, as technology
advances, attackers have a natural advantage.
Some of it's a basic first mover advantage.
But in general, unorganized attackers can make use of
innovations faster.
So imagine someone invents the motor car.
And the police say, well that's a
really interesting thing.
We could use one of those.
So they have a group to study the automobile, and they
produce an RFP, and they get bids, and they pick an
automobile manufacturer, they get a car, they have a
training system.
Meanwhile, the burglar says, oh look, a new getaway
vehicle, and can, much more quickly, use that.
We saw that on the internet.
And if you remember, as soon as the internet became a
commercial entity, we saw a new breed of cyber criminal
appear organically, out of the ground, immediately able to
commit crimes, and fraud, and identity theft.
All of these new things just showed up.
Meanwhile, the police, who were trained on Agatha
Christie novels, took, what, 10 years to figure it out.
And they have figured it out.
But if you were around during that time, it was really
painful, as they had no idea what cyber crime
was, or how it worked.
So there's this delay when a new technology appears.
And that's what I think of as a security gap--
the delay between when the non-powerful can make use of
the new technology--
the fast and nimble--
and when the powerful, the big and ponderous, can make use of
the technology.
And that gap gives attackers a natural advantage.
And I'll spare you the details, but basically, that
gap tends to be greater when there's more technology--
when your curve is greater.
And it's greater in times of rapid technological--
actually, it's greater in times of rapid social change
due to technological change.
And today, we're living in a world with more technology
than ever before, and greater ramp of social change, due to
technological change, than ever before.
So we're seeing an ever increasing security gap.
So this is the big question that I do not
have an answer to--
who wins?
Who wins, and in what circumstance?
Does big, slow power beat small, nimble power?
And there's going to be some David and Goliath metaphor, or
Robin Hood and sheriff.
I guess I'm going to need a more medieval metaphor.
But that seems like an open question that we don't know.
So for example, in Syria, recently, we saw the Syrian
dissidents use Facebook to organize.
We saw the Syrian government use Facebook to arrest
dissidents.
So right now, it's kind of a mess.
As this shakes out, who gets the upper hand?
Right now, it seems like governments do.
It seems like the ability to collect, to analyze, to employ
police beats dissidents.
It seems like the big corporations win.
That the need to have a credit card, or be on Facebook, and
to do all these things to live your life are such that you
can't shut them off.
And they win.
But it's not clear to me.
It does seem clear to me that those that want to get around
the systems always will be able to.
But really, I'm now concerned about everyone in the middle.
The nimble are here.
The powerful are here.
Here's the rest of us, which, I guess,
is the hapless peasants.
And as the powerful get more control, I think we get
largely left out of any negotiations.
And you see this in arbitrary rules, in
arbitrary terms of service.
You see this in secret NSA spying programs, or secret
overrides to rules, and power aligning with power.
It's not clear to me that these actually do catch
terrorists.
It's pretty clear to me that they don't, actually.
But they do affect the rest of us.
And I think these power issues are going to affect all of the
discussions we have about the future of the internet in the
coming decade.
Because these are actually complex issues.
We have to decide how we balance personal privacy
against law enforcement.
How do we balance them when we want to prevent copy
protection, or prevent child pornography?
When we decide, is it acceptable for us to be judged
by computer algorithms.
Is it acceptable to feed us search results?
To loan us money for a house?
To search us at airports?
To convict us of drunk driving?
How do these algorithms affect us?
Do we have the right to correct data about ourselves,
or to delete it?
Do we want computers to forget?
There's a lot of social lubricant in our society by
the fact that we are a forgetting species.
Do you really want--
I mean, I don't want Google Glass because I don't my wife
to be able to pull up old arguments.
That seems bad.
There's a lot of power struggles.
And there are bigger ones coming.
Cory Doctorow writes about the coming battles having to do
with 3D printing.
And they're very much the same as the copyright battles.
There will be powerful interests that want to stop
the execution of certain data files.
It was music and movies.
In the future, it will be working guns.
It will be the Nike swoosh.
His favorite example is anatomically correct,
interchangeable Barbie torsos, which I never thought of, but
would freak out Mattel, probably, rightly so.
Or little statues of Mickey Mouse, which will freak out a
very powerful company.
RECORDED VOICE: Of Mickey Mouse
BRUCE SCHNEIER: Who is that?
We see some incredibly destabilizing
technologies coming.
And this whole debate on weapons of mass destruction--
nuclear, chemical, biological--
the idea is that, as technology magnifies power,
society can deal with fewer bad events.
So if the average bad guy--
I'm just going to make this up-- can kill 10 people before
he's captured, or rob 10 houses before he's captured,
we could handle so many robbers.
But if they can now do 100 times as much damage, we now
need only 1/100 of them to maintain the
same security level.
A lot of our security is based on having some
low level of badness.
But as power magnifies the amount of badness each
individual can do, you suddenly start needing much
more control.
I'm not even convinced that that will work.
But that's going to be a huge debate.
And that's going to push fear buttons.
Today, largely, the powerful are winning these debates.
And I worry that these are actually
very complicated issues.
They required meaningful debate, international
cooperation, innovative solutions, which doesn't sound
like I just described the US government.
But we're going to have to do this.
In a lot of ways, the internet is a fortuitous accident.
It is a combination of lack of commercial interests,
government benign neglect, some military core
requirements for survivability and resilience, and computer
engineers with vaguely libertarian leanings, doing
what made technical sense.
That was, kind of, the stew of the internet.
And that stew is gone.
There are policy battles going on, right now, over the future
of the internet, in legislatures around the world,
in international standards bodies, in international
organizations.
And I'm not sure how this is all going to play out.
But I have some suggestions for different people.
For researchers, I want to see a lot more research into these
technologies of social control--
surveillance, censorship, propaganda, and use control.
And especially for you guys at Google, you're in a unique
position to study propaganda.
There is very little work being done on recognizing
propaganda.
And what I want is for my internet to come with all
propaganda with a little yellow box, kind of like what
you do on your search pages.
My paid commercial is flagged as such.
I would like to be done automatically.
This seems vaguely impossible, but I think we need to start
thinking about it.
There is some research done around the edges.
There's research done in recognizing fake Yelp reviews,
recognizing fake Amazon reviews.
But there's, right now, questions whether trending
topics on Twitter is being gamed.
So when we're losing this transparency, there's a lot of
questions about the information we get.
But I think we need research.
Because those four things are going
to become very important.
And understanding how they work, and how to get around
them, is going to become very important.
We need safe places to anonymously publish.
Wikileaks was great, but now seems no more.
Right now, the best thing we have is something called
Strongbox, that "The New Yorker" is running.
I'm in the process of trying to review that
system right now.
I think we need a lot more of these, all around the world.
We do need research into use limitation.
I believe we're going to get legislation on, basically,
copy protection for digital objects because of the 3D
printers, because of bio printers, because of software
defined radio.
And that's going to really hurt our industry.
Because lawmakers are not going to get this right.
They're going to do something draconian, and
it's going to be ugly.
So the better we can solve the actual problems, the less
likely we are to be handed solutions that won't work, and
will hurt everything else.
To vendors, I want people to remember that a lot of the
technologies we build have dual use, that business and
military uses are basically the same.
So you see Blue Coat used to censor the Syrian internet, or
Sophos used to eavesdrop on the internet, or social media
enabling surveillance.
On the one hand, the FBI is trying to get laws passed to
have us put back doors in our communication systems.
On the other hand, we don't want other countries to do the
same thing.
This is hard.
The policy prescriptions, I think, are harder.
I think in the near term, we need to keep circumvention
legal, and keep net neutrality.
I think those two things give us some backstop towards the
powerful becoming even more powerful.
Long term, fundamentally, we have to recognize we can't
have it both ways, that if we want privacy, we have to want
it everywhere-- our country and abroad.
If we think that surveillance is good, we have
to accept it elsewhere.
Fundamentally, I want to see power levelled.
Because the relationship is real unbalanced.
If you think about historical feudalism, or you read about
it, it eventually evolved into a more balanced government
relationship.
So you had feudalism, which started out as this bilateral
agreement--
we're in a dangerous world.
I need you to protect me.
So I will pledge my allegiance to you--
turned into something very unbalanced--
I'm powerful.
I can do whatever I want.
I will ignore my agreements.
You're powerless.
You can't do anything.
And that eventually changed with the rise of the nation
state, with, basically, rules that gave the feudal lords
responsibilities as well as rights, culminating in
something like the Magna Carta.
And I think we're going to need something like that on
the internet, with the current set of powers on the internet,
which will be both government and corporate--
some basic understanding that there are rights and
responsibilities.
There's some more balanced relationship.
And whether that's limitations on what vendors can do with
our data, or some public scrutiny for the rules by
which we are judged by our data, I expect--
no time soon, but eventually-- these will come.
Because I think this is how we get liberty in
your internet world.
And I think this is actually a very long
and difficult battle.
I think some of the results will upend your company.
But they might not be coming for a decade or more.
So that's what I have prepared.
I'm happy to take questions.
[APPLAUSE]
BRUCE SCHNEIER: So there are some rules about a microphone
that are confusing to me.
AUDIENCE: You talked about a game between governments, on
one hand, and corporations, on the other, using each other's
power systems to essentially get at everyone in the middle.
How long do you think that that game can play out?
Is it indefinite?
Can it continue for the foreseeable future?
Or do you see some sort of turning point in which some
scandal or something will so threaten the middle as to
galvanize them?
BRUCE SCHNEIER: I don't know.
And I think we're very much in uncharted territory, here.
We're living in a world where it's very hard for the middle
to be galvanize, for lots of different reasons.
A lot of people have written about this.
I have trouble predicting the future, because things are
changing so fast.
Right now, it all seems quite dysfunctional, and that
there's no mechanism for things to change.
But of course, that's ridiculous.
That things will change.
Exactly how, I don't know.
And which way they'll change, I don't know.
If the world is the terrorists might have nukes, and we're
all going to die unless we live under totalitarianism,
people are going to accept that.
Because when people are scared, that's
what they'll accept.
And technology is to the point where that actually
might be the world.
But there are a lot of other ways this can play.
I think this is, vaguely, the topic of my next book, so I
hope to explore the different avenues we
might move out of this.
I haven't even begun to have an idea of which is likely to
be correct.
And I think I wouldn't trust me when I've decided.
Just read science fiction 20 years ago.
We're really bad at predicting, not technical
future, but social future.
Everyone could predict the automobile--
that it would make people drive faster.
But no one predicted the suburb.
It's always the second order social effects.
And that's what this is all about.
So I just don't know.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned the convergence of power,
convergence of objectives, for the corporations and
governments, and also, sort of the convergence of
capabilities, like the Exxon Mobil comment.
Do you see anything along the lines of the distinction
between them vanishing?
Corporations as states
BRUCE SCHNEIER: --I think they, largely, are vanishing.
And this is my main complaint with libertarianism as a
philosophy.
In the mid 1700s, it was great, because it identified
the fact that power imbalance is bad, and we need to
equalize power.
But it kind of got stuck there, and didn't notice that
power changed.
I think there is a lot of blurring.
And some of it is the fact that money controls
government.
And powerful corporations have the money.
We have seen blurring at other times in history--
the Dutch East India Company in Africa.
There are different examples where corporations were de
facto governments in areas where they were operating.
This is not as stark.
But power is changing.
Power is less hard power.
Power is more soft power, to use Nye's term.
That the nature of power is changing, such--
so I do think there is a blurring.
But it's different than we thought, when we
worried about this.
The nature of social control is very, very different now,
than it was.
The nature of surveillance is very different.
And it's going to change again.
What is the half-life of these technologies?
10 years?
Five?
So what's going to happen in five to 10 years that will be
completely different?
I don't know.
AUDIENCE: I really liked your feudalism analogy, and I see
one potential flaw in it.
And I wanted your--
BRUCE SCHNEIER: Oh, good.
Flaws are good.
I love those.
AUDIENCE: --thought about it.
As I understand it, feudal lords were pretty much
monopolists.
Like, the Russian serfs were bound to the land, and so they
didn't get a choice of which Lord to be with.
Whereas, people do, in fact, have a choice when there's two
or three big guys, right?
BRUCE SCHNEIER: They have a choice.
But is it really a choice?
If all three cellphone companies are collecting the
same data, and giving it to the same government under the
same rules, it's not really a choice.
AUDIENCE: But if I can get a lot more customers by having a
very clear privacy policy the respects you in a way the
other guy doesn't, then--
BRUCE SCHNEIER: It seems not to be true.
It seems you get more customers by obfuscating your
privacy policy.
And there are a lot of great psych experiments about this,
that if you make privacy salient by showing your
privacy policy, people will say, whoa, that's bad.
Facebook is a great example.
They make the privacy policy really hard to find.
Because they don't want you think about it.
Because if you don't think about it, you share.
So this is the problem with mini-big.
Your normal market economics, which involves multiple
sellers competing on features, only works if you've got a lot
of sellers competing on features.
If the three companies that do the same thing--
I mean, what's the difference between Apple and Microsoft in
operating systems?
Is it really that different where privacy matters?
Around the edges-- unless the companies choose to compete on
those features--
I can't fly less secure airlines where we'd get you
through air security quicker.
There is no competition in that.
Or more secure airlines-- we do a
background check on everybody.
It's a perfectly reasonable feature to compete on, but
there isn't any competition.
So especially if some of these deal with government demands,
you're just not going to have the competition.
And there's a lot a reason to make that go
away as much as possible.
Because these companies want people to share more.
[INAUDIBLE] land is interesting.
No.
Well, yes and no.
It's very hard for someone regular to leave Facebook.
That's where your party invites come from.
That's where your friends are.
That's where your social interaction is.
You don't go on Facebook, you don't get invited to parties,
you never get laid, you have a really sucky college
experience.
So you're not bound.
But there's a lot of social push to stay.
It's very hard to take your data when you leave-- again,
Google is an exception, here.
Remember the whole battles about cellphone number
portability?
That was all to bind people to the cellphone companies, to
raise the cost of switching.
You raise the cost of switching, you can do a lot
more to your customers, or users.
If the customers can't switch, you can piss
them off a whole lot.
So, yeah.
And the other reason I kind of like the serf model is the
notion of people doing stuff online, which is the raw
material that companies use to make profits.
So it's kind of like you're farming for your life.
And I guess Farmville would be perfect for this, right?
But maybe that's too much.
The other way that the metaphor works-- and other
people have written about this--
the feudal metaphor--
is that, in a feudal system, everything is owned.
There's no commons.
And we're seeing this on the internet, that no piece of the
internet is a commons.
In the United States, we have very
particular rules about commons--
free speech rules, association rules, rules about
protesting--
because you're on a street.
You're on a public street.
And those rules don't apply in, for example, Zuccotti Park
in New York, because that was a privately
owned public space.
The internet is, entirely, privately owned public spaces.
So Apple is well within its rights to say, to an app
creator who made an app to show US drone strikes in
Pakistan, you can't have your app on my store.
Because it is not a free speech-- it is not a protest.
This is a private space.
Apple gets to decide.
So this lack of a public sphere in the world where we
are all associating is another way the feudal model works.
I don't know how to fit it in to what I'm doing.
I'll probably figure it out sooner or later.
AUDIENCE: The feudal model is really
appealing at first blush.
But another problem with it is that we actually do live in a
democracy, at least theoretically.
And we do have the power to vote, at least theoretically.
The problem seems, to me, not that there are currently all
kinds of tricks, like the people who obfuscate the
privacy policies win.
It's more about the lassitude of those who are being
governed by the government they set up, or the
corporations they choose to do business with.
And so ultimately, the problem is we aren't looking after our
own interests.
And so that seems to be what needs to be fixed.
And it's not feudalism, because we have the
opportunity to escape.
We're just not taking advantage
of it through tricks.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: I agree with that.
It's just getting harder and harder.
And some of it is the fact that we are just too good at
psychological manipulation.
Advertising, political speeches, have gotten to good.
I don't know how fair the game is.
Yes, you are fundamentally right.
The question is does that translate to
being right in practice.
The United States is particularly hard.
Our political system is not designed for a huge spectrum
of political ideas.
Go to any other countries and you just realize how narrow
our political debate is, just because of the way our two
party system is set up.
But again, unless the parties choose to compete on these
features, we don't really have a choice.
And some features they do, and some they don't.
But yes, you are inherently right.
By the book, that's correct.
The question is how does that translate into to what we can
actually do, realistically.
AUDIENCE: So we need to trick Facebook into
becoming the EFF.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: I'm game.
AUDIENCE: Does that mean that governments have an incentive
to encourage there to be a few small companies, so that then,
they don't compete on things like privacy?
If there's only three, it's much harder for them to
compete on something like that.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: I don't know.
There are a lot of examples we could look at.
We could start poking at some of them.
Automobile manufacturers--
they do compete on safety, and have for many years.
Saab built an industry on our car is safer than your car.
So you do see security features, sometimes.
In a lot of ways, the organic food
movement is a food safety--
MALE SPEAKER: Saab is gone.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: Yeah, but in the '70s, that
was what they did.
MALE SPEAKER: Organic food was safe.
BRUCE SCHNEIER: Yeah but, organic food is
believed to be more pure.
It's a food purity sale, which is inherently a health sale,
and a safety sale.
You can argue whether it's real or fake, but it's how the
companies are competing.
I don't think the government is incenting any particular
economic outcome.
I think there's just, right now, a very happy confluence.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]